Newport Art Museum’s Art After Dark, which recently received the 2017 Editor’s Pick Award for Best Artsy Social Event by Rhode Island Monthly Magazine, is back on Thursday, July 12 from 5 – 9 pm. Each Art After Dark has unique programming for the whole family. This event joins the ranks of the many events and educational programs the Museum currently offers in its galleries at 76 Bellevue Avenue, Newport. Admission to Art After Dark is free for Museum members and is a $10 suggested donation for non-members.
This month, Art After Dark invites you to travel beyond time and space to experience the immersive and otherworldly works of artist Cristi Rinklin and musician and filmmaker Rachel Blumberg. Rinkin’s spectacular territories and luxurious fantastical landscapes shepherd the viewer into the far reaches of the universe with a combination of comic book graphics, luscious classical peepholes, and mysterious vortexes. Blumberg, who has performed with groups such as The Decemberists and Death Vessel, and has created stop motion animation music videos for Gillian Welch and Devotchka, will improvise a fragile and mesmerizing live soundscape to match her Arch Cape stop motion animated film. Come be transported through bright blankets of fog, down a long country road, and on a billowing cloud walk at the Newport Art Museum’s Art After Dark. Rinklin will present a Gallery Talk at 6 pm in her exhibition, “Paramnesiac,” followed by the Arch Cape film screening and live performance by Rachel Blumberg at 7 pm.
Held on the second Thursday of each month, Art After Dark features artful programs, talks, film screenings, gallery games, music, drinks and inspired conversation. Each Art After Dark is unique and full of new adventures. Make a night of it at Art AfterDark: Gallery Games, art making, light snacks, cash bar and sparkling conversation await!
About Cristi Rinklin
Cristi Rinklin’s mesmerizing paintings carry the viewer into new and spectacular territories. With their swelling shapes, billowing clouds of smoke, animated rivers, and blankets of fog in bright colors, Rinklin’s landscape paintings have one foot in the familiar real world and the other in a luxurious fantasy world. According to Rinklin, her work “… is made with awareness of the tradition of illusionism in the historical practice of Painting—its ability to create a simulated reality that psychically transports the viewer, and to function as a mirror that reflects the subconscious.”
To make her evocative paintings, Rinklin mines and combines images from various sources: canonical landscape paintings from art history, Google images, collected photographs, virtual reality, and her own photographs made with the use of a drone. She creates a digital collage, which becomes the starting place for a separate large-scale painting. The world that she creates in each of these paintings, in the words of the artist, is “an uninhabited, detached fragment that floats in an ambiguous, abstract space… The combination of tangible realism, abstraction, and ambiguity are intended to disrupt the viewer’s ability to ground or position himself in any particular time or space.” Part fantasy and part phantasmagoria, Rinklin’s paintings reinvigorate and reinvent the tradition of landscape painting.
Cristi Rinklin has had numerous national and international exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout New England, and in New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Madison, Baton Rouge, Seattle, Amsterdam, Florence, and Rome. Her paintings have been included in the 2010 and 2012 Northeast editions of New American Paintings. She is also the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Berkshire Taconic Artist’s Resource Trust, and Jerome Foundation Fellowship, and has been a Visiting Artist/Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. She earned her B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute, College of Art and M.F.A. from University of Minnesota. A Professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, Rinklin lives and works in Boston. She is represented by Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston.
About Rachel Blumberg
Rachel Blumberg is a multidisciplinary artist and educator working in in the fields of music, visual art, and film/animation. She composes experimental percussion-based music and performs and records both under the name Arch Cape as well as in collaboration with other artists. She has performed and recorded with with many widely acclaimed artists including The Decemberists, M.Ward, Bright Eyes, Califone, Mirah, Tara Jane O’Neil, Michael Hurley, Sam Beam (Iron and Wine), Death Vessel, The Huntress and Holder of Hands, and many more. Her visual art and films have been exhibited in galleries all over the Pacific Northwest and Eastern Seaboard. As an animator/filmmaker she creates short films and music videos using a combination of cut paper, found objects, paintings/drawings, computer animation and film and has made music videos for Iron & Wine, Gillian Welch, Nada Surf, and Tom Hagerman (Devotchka) among others. Originally from the woods and rivers of Portland, Oregon, she now lives in coastal New England.
Arch Cape is a solo project and improvisational experiment that involves live music and stop motion animation. Blumberg’s explorations into new musical and visual language revolve around ideas of human thought, feeling, and perception. Using various forms of the drum set, pitched and non-pitched percussion, synthesizers, and her voice, Arch Cape improvises fragile, beautifully mesmerizing, sometimes explosive emotional soundscapes to her stop motion animated and film collages.
About the Newport Art Museum
Founded in 1912, The Newport Art Museum is one of the oldest continuously operating and most highly regarded art museums and schools of its kind in the country. The Art Museum offers a provocative diversity of creative voices in its historic Newport setting. Visitors can expect treasures from its permanent collection featuring American art from the late 19th century to the present, as well as programmed exhibitions of contemporary art. Dedicated Museum docents are available to offer guided tours of the campus and educate visitors on the architecture, artwork and history of the Museum. Artist Talks, film screenings, lectures and musical performances are scheduled throughout the year.
The Museum operates on a three-building campus, the main building being National Historic landmark, the John N.A. Griswold House. It was designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt, completed in 1864 and remains the premier example of American “Stick-Style” architecture. Richard Morris Hunt went on to design Marble House, The Breakers, Ochre Court, Belcourt Castle, and other landmarks in Newport and New York, including the base for the Statue of Liberty. Adjacent to the Griswold House is the Cushing Building, built in 1919, featuring two rotating galleries as well as the Cushing Memorial Gallery dedicated to the artist Howard Gardiner Cushing. Completing the three-building campus is the Art Museum’s art school, the Coleman Center for Creative Studies, which offers year-round art classes, camps and workshops, incorporates the Museum’s collection into its curriculum and focuses on art fundamentals as well as design, digital studies and continuing education for artists of all ages and interests. The Newport Art Museum is fully accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
The Museum is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm, Thursdays April – December until 7 pm, Sunday from noon to 5 pm, and from 10 am to 9 pm every second Thursday of the month for the Art After Dark programming. The Museum is closed to the public on Mondays. Museum membership levels and benefits, art school classes and registration, exhibition schedules, public programming, and more can be found at www.newportartmuseum.org. Phone: (401) 848-8200.